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Spring Breakers Review

This was one of those movies that I found quite hard to watch, not just because it was so over the top and ridiculous, but also because it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I read reviews afterwards about the symbolism and how it’s actually incredibly smart but to me that wasn’t there.

Spring Breakers follows a group of girls who want to go off to spring break but can’t afford it, so they rob a restaurant with guns to get money, standard. They go off to spring break and have a great time full of alcohol and twerking and drugs until they’re arrested. A man by the name of Alien pays their bail and the girls are set free, and decide to befriend this gangster. He is notorious for armed robberies and killing people etc. and of course this seems pretty cool to the girls. Well most of them, Faith, the innocent one drops off pretty quickly and returns home. Good girl, that’s what I would’ve done.

Slowly the group fall apart until there are only two girls left, the two baddest ones who go into a rival’s home and kill everyone there. It’s very brutal and honestly took a very dark turn from where it began. At first the violence and drugs etc. was almost playful and whimsical, but now it was just dark and very realistic.

One thing that really stood out to me firstly about this movie was the casting. Both Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, Disney kids, were in this movie as well as Ashley Benson from Pretty Little Liars. It was weird watching actors I have grown up with from a young age twerking and doing coke. It felt unnatural and put me on edge immediately, but I guess that added to the movie as a whole.

James Franco’s character Alien was horrific. I absolutely hated any moment he was on the screen and that shows that he played the character very well. You’re not supposed to like this character and I honestly despised him. This whole movie had a sense of dread and terror about it and it did make for quite a hard watch. Even during the good bits where they were just being normal teenagers you never felt like it would last.

Overall I found this movie just too over the top and weird and I just felt uneasy the whole time which is not a nice feeling. All the characters were quite bad and hard to watch and their interactions at times were bizarre. I can’t imagine this ever being a real thing that could happen in the real world and it was just too much.

Reading other reviews I understand where they were coming from but, for me, it just didn’t work and I wouldn’t watch it again.